Thread: Driver side air deployed while driving
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Old Apr 26, 2007 | 02:04 AM
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bigpapapuff
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Joined: Apr 2007
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From: Columbia Gorge, Washington
Talking Re: Driver side air deployed while driving
I'm pretty intrigued by this air bag deployment. So much so that I had to dig out the service manual and take a good look at the electrical drawings. One thing is pretty clear (like duh...) (I'm an electrical/mechanical engineer, so no wise cracks... LOL), everything is redundant, ie, left side impact firing squibs, driver seatbelt firing squibs, driver firing squibs, except for the left side impact sensor itself. So according to the electrical diagrams, it appears that if the left side impact sensor had failed, not only would the side air bag deploy, but so would the drivers air bag and the seat belt tensioner would have fired.

With redundancy being the key here, the logical thing to look at would be the Occupant Restraint Controller. It's a complicated little gadget that looks at the inputs from the impact sensors (and lots of other things like vehicle speed) and tells the firing squibs for the air bags to fire or not to do any thing at all depending on the situation. So a good guess here would be some type of a failure in the Occupant Restraint System is what caused your air bag to just pop out on its own. That air bag has 2 firing squibs on it. Both squibs have to fire for the air bag to deploy. So if one of the squibs would have failed then nothing would have happened.

Hope this makes some sense and gives you some kind of an idea on what may of happened. I could be off base on this but looking at the drawings in the service manual, I think I am on the money.

Let us know what you find out.
 
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